It didn’t work. Surges of panic kept breaking the calm. The prickling in her fingers intensified into twisting knives. She was on fire, every part of her burned excruciatingly, and Altan’s voice echoed from everywhere.
It should have been you.
She ran to the door, kicked the chair away, undid the locks, and ran barefoot out into the passageway. Stabs of pain pricked the backs of her eyes, made her vision spark and flash.
She squinted, struggling to see in the dim light. Nezha had said his cabin was at the end of the passage . . . so this one, it had to be . . . She banged frantically against the door until it opened and he appeared in the gap.
“Rin? What are you—”
She grabbed his shirt. “Where’s your physician?”
His eyebrows flew up. “Are you hurt?”
“Where?”
“First deck, third door to the right, but—”
She didn’t wait for him to finish before she started sprinting toward the stairs. She heard him running after her but she didn’t care; all that mattered was that she get some opium, or laudanum, or whatever was on board.
But the physician wouldn’t let her into his office. He blocked the entrance with his body, one hand against the doorframe, the other clenched on the door handle.
“Dragon Warlord’s orders.” He sounded like he’d been expecting her. “I’m not to give you anything.”
“But I need—the pain, I can’t stand it, I need—”
He started to close the door. “You’ll have to do without.”
She jammed her foot in the door. “Just a little,” she begged. She didn’t care how pathetic she sounded, she just needed something. Anything. “Please.”
“I have my orders,” he said. “Nothing I can do.”
“Damn it!” she screamed. The physician flinched and slammed the door shut, but she was already running in the opposite direction, feet pounding as she neared the stairs.
She had to get to the top deck, away from everyone. She could feel the pricks of malicious memory pressing like shards of glass into her mind; bits and pieces of suppressed recollections that swam vividly before her eyes—corpses at Golyn Niis, corpses in the research facility, corpses at Speer, and the soldiers, all with Shiro’s face, jeering and pointing and laughing, and that made her so furious, made the rage build and build—
“Rin!”
Nezha had caught up with her. His hand grasped her shoulder. “What the hell—”
She whirled around. “Where’s your father?”
“I think he’s meeting with his admirals,” he stammered. “But I wouldn’t—”
She pushed past him. Nezha reached for her arm, but she ducked away and raced through the passageway and down the stairs to Vaisra’s office. She jiggled the handles—locked—then kicked furiously at the doors until they swung open from inside.
Vaisra didn’t look remotely surprised to see her.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we’ll need some privacy, please.”
The men inside vacated their seats without a word. None of them looked at her. Vaisra pulled the doors shut, locked them, and turned around. “What can I do for you?”
“You told the physician not to give me opium,” Rin said.
“That is correct.”
Her voice trembled. “Look, asshole, I need my—”
“Oh, no, Runin.” Vaisra lifted a finger and wagged it, as if chiding a small child. “I should have mentioned. A last condition of your enlistment. I do not tolerate opium addicts in my army.”
“I’m not an addict, I just . . .” A fresh wave of pain racked her head and she broke off, wincing.
“You’re no good to me high. I need you alert. I need someone capable of infiltrating the Autumn Palace and killing the Empress, not some opium-riddled sack of shit.”
“You don’t get it,” she said. “If you don’t drug me, I will incinerate everyone on this ship.”
He shrugged. “Then we’ll throw you overboard.”
She could only stare at him. This made no sense to her. How could he remain so infuriatingly calm? Why wasn’t he caving in, cowering in terror? This wasn’t how it was supposed to work—she was supposed to threaten him and he was supposed to do what she wanted, that was always how it worked—
Why hadn’t she scared him?
Desperate, she resorted to begging. “You don’t know how much this hurts. It’s in my mind—the god is always in my mind, and it hurts . . .”
“It’s not the god.” Vaisra stood up and crossed the room toward her. “It’s the anger. And it’s your fear. You’ve seen battle for the first time, and your nerves can’t shut down. You’re frightened all the time. You think everyone’s out to get you, and you want them to be out to get you because then that’ll give you an excuse to hurt them. That’s not a Speerly problem, it’s a universal experience of soldiers. And you can’t cure it with opium. There’s no running from it.”
“Then what—”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “You face it. You accept that it’s your reality now. You fight it.”
Couldn’t he understand that she’d tried? Did he think it was easy? “No,” she said. “I need—”
He cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
Rin’s tongue felt terribly heavy in her mouth. Sweat broke out over her body; she could see it beading on her hands.
He raised his voice. “Are you contradicting my orders?”
She took a shuddering breath. “I—I can’t. Fight it.”
“Ah, Runin. You don’t understand. You’re my soldier now. You follow orders. I tell you to jump, you ask how high.
“But I can’t,” she repeated, frustrated.
Vaisra lifted his left hand, briefly examined his knuckles, and then slammed the back of his hand across her face.
She stumbled backward, more from the shock than the force. Her face registered no pain, only an intense sting, like she’d walked straight into a bolt of lightning. She touched a finger to her lip. It came away bloody.
“You hit me,” she said, dazed.
He grasped her chin tightly in his fingers and forced her to look up at him. She was too stunned to feel any rage. She wasn’t angry, she was only afraid. No one dared to touch her like this. No one had for a long time.
No one since Altan.
“I’ve broken in Speerlies before.” Vaisra traced a thumb across her cheek. “You’re not the first. Sallow skin. Sunken eyes. You’re smoking your life away. Anyone could smell it on you. Do you know why the Speerlies died young? It wasn’t their penchant for constant warfare, and it wasn’t their god. They were smoking themselves to death. Right now I wouldn’t give you six months.”
He dug his nails into her skin so hard that she gasped. “That ends now. You’re cut off. You can smoke yourself to death after you’ve done what I need you for. But only after.”
Rin stared at him in shock. The pain was starting to seep in, first a little sting and then a great throbbing bruise across her entire face. A sob rose up in her throat. “But it hurts so much . . .”
“Oh, Runin. Poor little Runin.” He smoothed her hair out of her eyes and leaned in close. “Fuck your pain. What you’re dealing with is nothing that a little discipline can’t solve. You’re capable of blocking out the Phoenix. Your mind can build up its own defenses, and you just haven’t done it because you’re using the opium as a safe way out.”